neXt Curve Insights – July 2023

This is the July 2023 edition of the neXt Curve Tech Insights newsletter. This edition covers SEMICON West 2023, Qualcomm HQ tour of ControlNet and Sony Honda Mobility’s Afeela, Snapdragon Sound at The Village Studios, and Samsung Galaxy Unpacked Fold and more. Subscribe for tech and industry insights that matter.

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CHIPS Act: The Leading Edge Gap

With $52.7 billion slated for grants to support Sections 9902 through 9906 of the 2021 National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA), Washington faces daunting next steps to define and execute on a CHIPS Act program to move the U.S. semiconductor industry toward domestic chip supply chain resiliency and manufacturing and technology leadership over the next five years.

With the growing tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the timeline for achieving domestic supply chain resiliency seems to be increasingly urgent. This is especially true for leading-edge manufacturing as the U.S. continues to trail  Asia. There are nontrivial risks that need to be addressed for Washington’s near- and long-term promises for the CHIPS Act to be realized.

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CHIPS Act: A Vital First Step

The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, signed Tuesday by President Biden, includes the stated purpose of challenging China’s pursuit of technological and manufacturing leadership in the global semiconductor industry. The bill easily passed both the Senate (64-33) and the House (243-187) with bipartisan support in both houses.

While the passage of the CHIPS Act is a historic achievement that directly addresses the need for chip supply chain resilience add capacity in the U.S., it is also a timely and important commitment to a much longer and comprehensive policy effort to ensure long-term U.S. technology and market share leadership in the vital semiconductor industry.

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Smart Living: Moving Beyond the Smart Home

For years the Smart Home has promised to enrich the lives of consumers and has inspired waves of manufacturer innovation such as smart speakers, intelligent thermostats and much more. While these innovations have offered incremental improvement in our home lives, the consumer reality has been a deluge of devices and services, greater complexity, and less security. In truth, the Smart Home remains elusive, the problems it intends to solve unclear. Only when manufacturers reach beyond devices and services with purpose-driven “Smart Living” solutions at home will this market cross the chasm to rapid market growth.

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Tech Insight: iOS 12 Gave Apple a Massive Ecosystem Advantage

When the latest series of iPhones are released, we love to see how they measure up to the competition.  The comparative evaluations are typically based on specs – number of cores, processor clock speed, RAM, removable storage – and increasingly on performance benchmark scores.  But what about the value that customers receive over the life of the device.  iOS 12 is enabling Apple to do something no other mobile device manufacturer is remotely able to do – keep your six-year old iPhone up to date and relevant.

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